I use VirtualBox for hosting virtual machines on my laptop and received a Windows 2008R2 server image from a consultant as a compressed QEMU image. So how to convert the QEMU image to a VirtualBox VDI image?

Attempting to create a file on a large XFS filesystem - and it fails with an exception indicating insufficient space! There is available blocks - df says so. HUh? While, unlike traditional UNIX filesystems, XFS doesn't suffer from the boring old issue of "inode exhaustion" it does have inode limits - based on a percentage of the filesystem size.

I use a lot of SD cards and USB thumb-drives; when plugging in these devices automount in /media as either the file-system label (if set) or some arbitrary thing like /media/disk46. So how can one modify or set the label on an existing FAT filesystem? Easy as:

You have a text file with four million records and you want to load this data into a table in an SQLite database. But some of these records are duplicates (based on certain fields) and the file is not ordered. Due to the size of the data loading the entire file into memory doesn't work very well. And due to the number of records doing a check-at-insert when loading the data is also prohibitively slow. But what does work pretty well is just to load all the data and then deduplicate it.

Decorators are a powerful as well as arcanely constructed feature of Python. Over at his BLOG Graham Dumpleton has written a series of [8 so far] articles covering Python decorator's in-depth. Lots of information here along with abundant examples.

There are few things in IT more utterly and completely baffling than the AIX printer subsystem. While powerful it accomplishes its task with more arcane syntax and scattered settings files than anything else I have encountered.

I have several Windows 2012 VMs in a cloud environment and discovered I am unable to install certain roles / features. Attempting to do so fails with an "The source files could not be found." error. This somewhat misleading messages indicates Windows is looking for the OS install media. Most of the solutions on the Interwebz for working around this error describe how to set the server with an alternate path to the install media ...

... and when you are configuring a router which either (a) does not have DNS, (b) is on a network that is down, or (c) is on the workbench and not actually connected to a network - you get to enjoy the long pause of a DNS timeout.

I purchased a copy of Windows 10 on a USB thumbdrive. I chose to have media to have (a) a backup and (b) not to have to bother with downloading a massive image. Primarily this copy of Windows will be used in VirtualBox for testing, using Power Shell, and other tedious system administrivia. First thing when it arrived is I used dd to make a full image of thumbdrive so I could tuck it away in a safe place.

Determine the DATE of the first day of the current week.

(SELECT TODAY - (WEEKDAY(TODAY)) UNITS DAY FROM systables WHERE tabid=1)

Informix always treats Sunday as day 0 of the week. The WEEKDAY function returns the number of the day of the week as a value of 0 - 6 so subtracting the weekday from current day (TODAY) returns the DATE value of Sunday of the current week.